Malware is a piece of code (or embedded within another piece of legitimate code) that is designed to do nefarious things if downloaded onto a computer, such as steal information for the computer, utilize the resources of the computer for illegal purposes without the knowledge of the user and the like.
Many systems exist that attempt to detect malware for a computer system. Examples of such systems include typical virus scanning system used on most laptops and desktop computers. Further, systems exist that attempt to detect malware for a mobile device and more specifically an Android operating system based device. However, these systems do not provide a high level of confidence that either malware has been identified or that malware has not been detected. Furthermore, due to the lack of confidence, these systems may generate false positives (an app that is identified as malware, but is in fact not malware) and false negatives (an app that is identified as clean, but is in fact malware.)
A number of the malware detection systems use “signatures” to be able to detect the malware. The limitation with these systems is that they only detect malware that matches the signature which means that can have a lot of false negatives and do not provide a high confidence level.